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Honorary Fellows

Each year the AATSP
considers outstanding achievement by individuals in the field of Hispanic and
Luso-Brazilian languages, literatures, cultures, linguistics, and cinema for
recognition as an AATSP Honorary Fellow.

The AATSP Bylaws outline
the qualifications for Honorary Fellows and describe the process for
approval. The relevant section of the
Bylaws is included at the end of this message.
Nominations for AATSP Honorary Fellows may be submitted by any AATSP
member in good standing and must be submitted using the Nomination Form for
Honorary Fellows.

CLICK HEREto view and download the Nomination Form for Honorary Fellows. Please
note that the Nomination Form contains information about what to include with
the Form as well as instructions for submission.

2016

LUIS VALDEZ

Playwright, Director, Writer, Actor,
Teacher

Acknowledged as the "godfather of Chicano theater,"
Luis Valdez (1940—) is the founder
and artistic director of El Teatro Campesino.
Started in 1965, Valdez has led the theater company to international
acclaim and numerous awards. The author and director of numerous plays, Valdez
has also written and directed two films: Zoot Suit, based on
his play of the same name and La Bamba, the 1987 hit movie
based on the life of the Mexican-American rock star, Ritchie Valens. It's his
work with El Teatro Campesino, however, and his dedication to advancing the
role of the arts in people's lives that sets Valdez apart from his
contemporaries. "If you want to understand modern Latino theater, you have
to know that Luis was the start," Sean San Jose of San Fran-cicso's Campo
Santo Theater Company told Karen D'Souza of the San Jose Mercury News. "Everything
that came after him was informed by him."

Born Luis Miguel Valdez on June 26, 1940 in Delano, California, Valdez was raised in the
agricultural labor camps around California where his parents worked in the
fields, picking what ever crop was in season. It was a small role in an
elementary school play and seeing his parents and those like them work the
long, grueling hours for little pay that moved Valdez to use the theater to
shed light on the Latino experience. "I took what I most feared, the thing
I was most ashamed of, and turned it into something I could write about,"
he told students at San Diego State Universtiy in 2000.

EL TEATRO CAMPESINO

Following graduation from high school, Valdez attended San Jose
State University where he produced his first play, The Shrunken Head of
Pancho Villa, in 1964. Following a short time with the famed San
Francisco Mime Troupe, Valdez joined activist Cesar Chavez in 1965 and sought
to raise funds for the grape boycott and farmworkers strike that Chavez had
organized, and bring attention to the plight of migrant farmworkers. Thus begun
El Teatro Campesino which performed short plays based on the struggles of the
farmworkers and people of Mexican descent. "He addressed cultural and
Chicano issues from the point of view of a migrant farmworker," Professor
Arsenio Cordova of the University of New Mexico told the Albuquerque
Journal. "He's been able to address those attitudes totally, of
discrimination."

LUIS VALDEZ AT A GLANCE

Born Luis Miguel Valdez on June 26, 1940, in Delano, CA; married
Guadalupe, August 23, 1969; children: Anahuac, Kinan, Lakin. Education: San
Jose State University, 1964.

After four years the small theater company received national
recognition by winning an Obie Award in New York and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award in 1969, and then
another L.A. Drama Critics Award in 1972. In 1977 Valdez co-wrote the
screenplay for Which Way is Up?, a comedy starring Richard
Pryor, and received a Rockefeller Foundation Artists-In-Residence grant which
enabled him to write the most famous play to come out of El Teatro Campesino in
1979, Zoot Suit.

Zoot Suit was based on the murder of a
Mexican American and the subsequent unfair trial of Mexican Americans or zoot
suiters, as they were termed by the press in Los Angeles in the early 1940s. A musical,
Valdez's Zoot Suit become one of the most popular plays to
have ever originated in Los Angeles and was the first play by a Chicano to be
presented on Broadway. A movie version, also written and directed by Valdez and
starring Edward James Olmos, was released in 1981 and was nominated for a
Golden Globe Award for Best Musical Picture.

La Bamba

Valdez had his most mainstream success in 1987 with another film
he wrote and directed, La Bamba. The story of Mexican American
rock and roller Ritchie Valens, whose brief time in the spotlight ended when he
was killed in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly, was one of that year's
biggest box office successes. That same year, Valdez adapted his play, Corridos:
Tales of Passion and Revolution, for PBS and won the prestigous
Peabody Award. That play had previously won the San Francisco Bay Critics
Circle Award for Best Musical, when it premiered in 1983.

In 1993 Valdez co-wrote and directed a made-for-TV movie
of The Cisco Kid starring Jimmy Smits. Broadcast on the Turner
Television Network, the entire production was filmed on location in Mexico. The
following year, Valdez received the prestigious Aguila Azteca Award (Golden
Eagle Award), which is the highest honor bestowed by the Mexican government for
citizens of other countries.

In 2000 Valdez became a founding faculty tenured professor at
the Center for Teledramatic Arts and Technology at California State University,
Monterey Bay. In this role, the playwright works with students from a variety
of backgrounds and encourages them to use technology in an effort to continue
the tradition of raising social issues through art. "Today, the
opportunity to distribute artistic work and share untold stories has never been
greater," Valdez told Alejandra Navarro of the Modesto Bee, adding
that he envisioned live theater going out over the Internet.

Back to "the Farmworker Question"

In 2001 Valdez returned to a play he began writing in 1976, and
to a subject matter that's never left him: farmworkers. "It's been 25
years," Valdez confessed to the San Jose Mercury News. "It's
time to come full circle, to come back to the farmworker question." Mundo
Mata tells the story of two migrant worker brothers divided by their
beliefs. One brother is idealistic and eager to join the United Farm Workers,
while the other falls into drugs after a tour of duty in Vietnam, and begins working for the landowners.

In the title role of Mundo was one of Valdez's sons, Kinan, who
shares his father's beliefs in the social significance of art and seeks to
instill those ideas in El Teatro Campesino of the future. "We, the new
generation at the theater, really want to take the company back to its roots in
agitational propaganda," Kinan Valdez told the San Jose Mercury
News. "The farm-workers are still stuck in the same place. We
want to remind people of the struggle."

In his work, Valdez attempts to illustrate, not just the plight
of Latinos and the prejudices they face, but also the fact that there are
differences among all people and that there is much to be learned from them.
"What comes out in the final analysis," he told the students at San Diego
State University, "is we are all more alike than we think, we're just from
different tribes."

Silviano Santiago writes
fiction and literary criticism and is considered already a classic in Brazil.
He received the José Donoso Ibero-American Prize of Letters for his work in
September-2014. Born in Formiga, a small town in Minas Gerais, in 1936, he moved
to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state, at 12 years old and degreed there
in Literature. He then went to Rio de Janeiro to study French Literature and
got a scholarship to go to Paris for his PhD at Sorbonne. In the sixties and
seventies, he was a visiting professor in universities around the world. His
vast work (31 published books) includes poetry, short stories, novels and
essays – all of them acclaimed by public and critics. Nowadays he contributes
to the major newspaper and magazines in Brazil, both to the general public and
specialized publications. He has been awarded with more than ten literary
prizes, among them Portugal Telecom, Mario de Andrade, Jabuti, Machado de Assis
(for his whole work), besides José Donoso, for the first time given to a
Brazilian author. He is currently finishing a new volume of essays to be
published by Companhia das Letras in 2016.